Work around for LinkedIn Group Managers to send messages to new members (Entered: 2009/03/25 15:43:12)

Recently LinkedIn has removed the ability for a group manager to download the list of members and e-mail addresses. I'm sure this was done because some group owners were abusing the the feature and spamming the members (remember spam is defined from the receivers point of view, not the senders). anyway, many group owners used this feature to send out "welcome to the group" messages to new users, this is not possible now.

As a work around for the "e-mailing new members" problem, I have a solution that I use, it is a bit more time consuming, but it works....

from the "requests to join" page before you approve the users, highlight the list of users, then copy and paste into notepad, this strips all html and other formatting characters, save the file as a *.txt file. open excel then open the txt file, use "|" as the column delimiter, then "finish" once imported you should have a column of e-mails. I then use the excel function "=trim(B5)" and copy this down the entire list of users..... then copy the column of e-mails into my e-mail program (g-mail) and then send my welcome message to new members. I do this in a separate g-mail account for each group. gmail saves a list of all addresses e-mailed, so this has the side benefit of creating and keeping a mail list as well (doesn't sync back to anything to update when users leave though).

I Hope this helps everyone. --Ben

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-- BenBurnett - 25 Mar 2009